If
Myanmar’s notorious army is to be believed — that’s a very big if — its
soldiers are facing a highly deranged adversary.

Along
Myanmar’s marshy coastline, villages keep going up in flames. All of them
belong to the Rohingya, a horribly persecuted Muslim group. The arsonists?
Muslims themselves, according to the army.

The
Rohingya, we are told, are burning their own homes to attract well-armed
government platoons — and then sprinting at them with knives, berserker style,
so that they can get mowed down[1] by
the dozens.

This
narrative defies logic. But it’s hard to challenge directly — and that’s how
the army likes it.

Myanmar’s
military has turned much of the Rohingya’s homeland into a no-go zone for aid
workers and non-compliant journalists. It has become, in the words of one
expert, an “information black hole.”[2]

These raids
began shortly after the October emergence of a poorly armed Rohingya militant group[4] numbering
in the hundreds. According to government reports, a series of clashes have
killed about 17 officers and more than 65 militants.

The
military is now in a highly advantageous position. It brings superior firepower
— columns of troops and attack choppers — to combat a ragtag group that is
mostly armed with “small guns, swords, spears and sticks.”[5]

Furthermore,
Myanmar’s predominately Buddhist citizens appear to broadly support[6] the
army’s purges. In one of Asia’s most ethnically diverse nations, no group is as
denigrated as the Rohingya.

Even fresh
claims of soldiers gang-raping Rohingya[7] women
at gunpoint have stirred little domestic outcry. One official, speaking to
the BBC[8], has refuted the claims by insisting Rohingya women are too
“dirty” to arouse troops.

The army is
operating in a void, free of critical onlookers who might defy the official
narrative. However, technology offers a few ways to illuminate the facts.

Using
satellite images, Human Rights Watch[9] has
monitored the remote region where the army’s purge is ongoing. Their findings:
a widespread torching of villages that has incinerated at least 400 buildings.

“These
satellite images of village destruction could be the tip of the iceberg given
the grave abuses being reported,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director
with Human Rights Watch.

In addition
to cameras orbiting the Earth, mobile phone cameras are also helping to reveal
Rohingya suffering. Shaky footage[10], allegedly
capturing the aftermath of air strikes, appears to show the corpses of children
sprawled out on the grass.

The exact
nature of these videos is hard to verify. But they suggest the Rohingya death
toll is not limited to wild-eyed terrorists rushing suicidally at soldiers.

The plight
of the Rohingya, already among the world’s most tormented groups, appears to
grow increasingly dire.

About 10
percent of the population of approximately 1 million already lives in bleak
internment camps controlled by the army. Food and medicine is scarce. Travel
outside is restricted. Hunger is rampant.

As for the
nation’s much-celebrated pro-democracy crowd that swirls around Myanmar’s
iconic, de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi? They have seemed largely dismissive[11] of
Rohingya woes for years.

The
emergence of inept militants, vowing to liberate their Rohingya people, has
only legitimized the public’s distrust of Muslims. But there are signs that
their tragedy could worsen from here.

Myanmar’s
government now plans to arm and train an all-Buddhist militia in the same state
the Rohingya inhabit. This new armed wing would be composed of ethnic
Arakanese, Buddhists who are also native to the area.

One
international monitoring group, the International Commission of Jurists[12], has called
this a “recipe for disaster.” But the plan is favored by one of the loudest
anti-Rohingya organizations, the Arakan National Party, which favors “inhuman acts”[13] to
rid their homeland of Muslims.

Last week,
as the army stormed Muslim villages, the group found time to congratulate
Donald Trump for winning the US presidential election.

“Being
engulfed in Islamization and illegal immigration problems,” the party wrote[14], “we the
Arakanese people look up to you as a new world leader who will change the
rigged system being infested with jihadi infiltrators.”

Patrick
Winn, is a journalist and documentary producer based in Southeast Asia, and a
correspondent for Global Post and PRI's The World, a radio show co-produced by
the BBC. He won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his reporting
on turmoil in post-totalitarian Myanmar. He can be reached via Twitter @pwinn5.[15]

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs